Tristan and Isolde

I am what you might call an "Arthur" buff. I'm a sucker for all that Camelot, Knights of the Round Table stuff. I'm not sure when that started, but about fifteen years ago I delved into it rather seriously. I read most of the main texts: Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of England, Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, plus several books about Arthurian legends and whether Arthur was a historical figure or not. A lot of that knowledge has seeped out of head in the intervening years, but I still retain a lot of it and have a bookshelf full of volumes on the subject.

Tristan, or Tristram, was tangentially an Arthurian legend. He is one of the round table in Malory, but the earliest representations of him, by the Anglo-Norman Thomas and the German Gottfried Von Strassburg, don't have anything to do with Arthur.

I am invariably disappointed with any film version of an Arthurian legend. Perhaps Monty Python ruined them forever by making the definitive film on the subject. John Boorman's Excalibur probably came close, but there have been some silly ones--First Knight, with Sean Connery and Richard Gere, and last year's King Arthur, which had the knights of the round table as Russians (!) and Guinivere a Pict. So when I popped the recent film Tristan and Isolde into my DVD player last night, I didn't expect much.

The film shot up in queue due to the casting of Sophia Myles, who I saw early this week in Art School Confidential. Even at my advanced age I get schoolboy crushes on actresses, and she's my latest. I was pleasantly surprised by some of the film, but overall it suffered from the usual problems in these kind of films--there's no magic to them. It was kind of a slog, and attempted to be realistic. That's well and good, but I'd rather see dragons and wizards than a realistic look at sixth century Britain.

What was good about the film was that it did maintain a shred of the actual story. Now, you can't fault a film for deviating from legend, because there were several versions of the stories. In this version of the story, we do get the main component of the love triangle between Tristan, Isolde, and King Mark of Cornwall. What we don't get is the other central feature, the love potion which makes the lovers crazy about each other. The change is explained in the supplementary material and it makes sense. We also don't get Isolde (or Iseult) of the White Hands, who Tristan marries when his main gal marries Mark.

This film's low budget also shows, and a story like this should be full of epic grandeur, and instead it's a small, dark, dank picture. But I admire the filmmakers for giving it a go, and not surrendering to silliness.